Terrorism against Biopower: the Study of Post-panopticism and Liquid Surveillance in Edward Bond’s The Under Room

In his plays, Edward Bond studies the prevalent violence in society as a consequence of the development of aggressive capitalism, economic and political institutions and institutional surveillance. In his The Under Room, Bond stages a dystopia within which surveillance and capitalistic administrations have devastated the social communication, and terrorism have impinged on the citizens’ lives. In the play, panopticism and surveillance are conveyed by informational technologies and data control. Therefore, in this research the themes of post-panopticism, liquid surveillance, and terrorism are studied in The Under Room. To meet such objective the concept of biopower, the binary opposition of multitude/people and the socio-cultural impulses of terrorism are put forth by utilizing Foucault, Baudrillard and Hardt-Negiri’s ideas. In a nutshell, the researcher concludes that post-panopticism and liquid surveillance are the governmental authoritarian means which result in the development of aggression and terroristic retaliations in the symbolic society of The Under Room.